Fonts are often where the trouble starts and often ends in DTP. They are in my experience one of the leading troubles in DTP in general and one of the sources of constant questions on the mailing list and IRC.
Scribus uses the freetype2 libraries for accessing font features. Scribus also does some error checking upon loading to verify the quality of the fonts. Not all fonts are up to the task for use in DTP. Why ?
High quality fonts are essential for reliable output, no matter which platform. Call me a font snob, but I never ever use freely downloaded shareware fonts. These are the fonts I use and trust are the following (in no particular order) :
You can find links for all the downloadable fonts noted above on the Scribus web and docs site.
Some distros package some freefonts and shareware fonts under various package names. I avoid them and have removed them from some installs without missing them.
Do not be surprised when shareware or clone TrueType fonts downloaded from the Internet disappoint when printed. Sometimes shareware TrueType fonts do not follow proper the proper encoding specs, so they are unreliable in a Postscript environment. Making good reliable fonts in the Postscript sense is not easy and requires extensive QA testing. An example: Verdana from the MS web font collection took almost a year to create.
Also, do not be put off by the lack of a great screen preview with the URW fonts - they are excellent printer fonts. Font faces like Palladio and Utopia for example, are not really attractive on screen, but they are excellent fonts for easy to read documents. There is a reason service bureaus and printers spend literally thousands of dollars for high quality font libraries.
As for installation, if you use $home/.fonts
directory for adding fonts, Scribus should find them just fine. For those leery of messing around with the command line tools for font installation, KDE 3.2+ includes an improved version of Keith Drummond's kfontinstaller program. The one in KDE 3.3 works superbly and you can even preview fonts within Konqueror. In my opinion it is one of the most user friendly font installers I have seen on any platform. Recommended.
Scribus also makes it easy to add additional font paths. Simply, close all documents, then select Settings > Fonts > Additional Paths. Select the new path and click OK. If fonts, still do not show up, you may need to add these to either your $home/.fonts.conf
file or other method depending on your distro. If some still fail to show up, it is possibly Scribus's font checking mechanism has disabled them.